This is Game of Thrones where Oberyn, a fan-favorite, got his head brutally crushed in while screaming in agony because he got cocky. Now all the characters have plot armor except a handful.

Like...this is the ultimate showdown battle. This is the Great War they've been building up for 7 years since the pilot, yet 90% of characters survive and the Night King dies because Arya teleport-ganks him from nowhere.

This is my one substantial criticism of the episode (other flaws I either don’t think are flaws, or can live with).

But it’s very substantial. The thing is, I don’t think GoT - the show or the books - has ever been all that daring about killing off characters. Certain characters have always been clearly marked as “Will survive until the climax.” Mostly, GoT kills off people who are very killable-off. And that’s fine — there’s no reason to do deaths that don’t serve the story just for the sake of showing that you can kill people off.

But you know what? We’re getting to the end now. Now is when you can kill people off whom you couldn’t easily kill before this, and this episode didn’t even kill off all that many people who could have died a while back.

There are peculiar problems with this episode in particular making it so very obvious that your chance of survival was high if the audience knew who you were. For one thing, it undercuts all the hard work that the director did — some of it very effective — to sell that this was a horrific and terrifying thing if such a high proportion of named characters are immune.

More importantly, though, we only have three episodes left, and leaving this many characters alive is an awful lot of characters to touch on in those three episodes. From a writing standpoint, this was an excellent opportunity to take people off the table so that the writing could focus on the relatively small number of people who, at this point, are key to the plot. How many of the secondary characters will get a better good-bye than they got in the previous episode?

(Except Grey Worm. His scene with Missandei last week went so far into being-just-one-day-away-from-retirement territory that he pretty much had to stay alive, leaving aside the question of the optics of it.)

I expect that we’ll learn next week that a couple more minor named characters died, admittedly. But still: Brienne, Podrick, Thormund, Gendry, Sam, even Sandor Clegane and Jaime — kill more of them off!

In fact, I’d have been quite happy if they’d had the courage to kill Arya off when she killed the Night King, for all that I think Maisie Richardson does a tremendous job in the part. If you’re going to do the thing where killing the Big Bad neatly takes away all his forces and saves everything, it’s better to extract a cost that the viewer is going to feel.

EDIT: When I say “quite happy,” there’s a consideration that you should be careful about doing the whole “Woman has intimate relations and dies” cliché, I suppose. But aside from that, I think Arya dying would have improved the episode.

So what have we learned from this episode?
Azor Ahai? Pointless
PWWP? Meaningless
Rhaegar Targaryen? Just a big dummy who liked to name his kids the same thing and got everyone killed
All the weird stuff underneath the citadel? What’s that?
Stark magic in Winterfell? Never heard of it
Combat tactics? Never learned it
Proper lighting? Never used it
Jon Snow? Still useless
Weirwood Net? Greenseeing? Warging? Useless aside for some stuff with crows
The White Walkers? Just some guys who REALLY want to destroy a USB
Surprise ninja flipping out with 1HKO backstab to end your entire mythic arc? Aww yeah that’s the stuff

I haven't watched really any GoT, but everyone was raving about the latest episode, so I took a break from studying, signed up for the HBO Channel on Amazon (7 day free trial) and jumped in on the last episode. The video quality on the HBO channel of Amazon Prime is really really bad. All the dark skies, back background, and blowing snow had those wonky visible gray bands like you get on really old DVDs. It was often hard to tell what was going on during the action scenes. And there were really noticeable artifacts on the video, like you are watching an overly compressed video on YouTube. I checked other GoT episodes, and they are all pretty bad. Since so much of the show (from what I saw) is very dimly lit, it is bad. I would consider it unwatchably dark and unforgivably not in HDR UHD for $15 a month.

I started watching the new season of True Detective and a few of the movies on the Amazon HBO channel, and they are beautiful quality for just 1080p. I wonder if Hulu or getting the show straight from an HBO app for Samsung makes a difference. If I ever do decide to watch GoT, I'll just save my pennies and get the 4k Blu-rays.

Like Butchern said, I think there could have been more than a little knowledge and cockiness involved; he had already kited Jon into an ambush earlier, having him draw closer before letting the others rise up around him. I could see him doing the same thing to get Arya out of the way.

Unfortunately none of these things will make “The Long Night” look any better until HBO releases a new version of it. Those ugly bands and artifacts are baked right in.

I'm linking to the article, but it may contain spoilers (I don't know enough about GoT to know), so I'm putting the link in spoilers . . . to protect the children, the elderly, and those with sensitive eyes.

"Why did last nights Game of Thrones look so bad? Here comes the science!"

I've really grown tired of the Arya worship by the writers in this show. I liked her character initially, and her traveling Westeros with The Hound was one of my favorite aspects of season...4 and 5, I think it was.

But now that it's no longer GRRM material the show is going from, D&D have just turned the show essentially into Arya's story. A few months of faceless man training and now she easily defeats battle hardened and years-long seasoned knights in melee while wearing her smug grin, she's flipping around like Darth Maul with her two-headed spear, she's teleport ganking the Night King, she's not afraid of anything and even shows up those who had fought the White Walkers (like that cringey scene with Gendry when she starts throwing knives at a post and he's supposed to be scared-impressed).

And now apparently D&D have said they chose Arya to kill the night king because it was "unexpected". So after 7 years building up the White Walkers. These big, mythical baddies whose legend casts a shadow across the entire series, who have been shown as this lurking, alien menace since the pilot episode, who's motivations are never truly clear, all that speculation, all the theories about their motivations/goals/desires, etc all of it gets thrown away on to "subvert our expectations". We got Last Jedied.

The least they could have done was had Bran Warg into Rhaegel the dragon to burn the whites, then Jon Snow engages the Night King and distracts him long enough to let Arya make the killing blow. I would've been fine with that. But after hearing the writers pathetic excuses of just wanting to do something "unexpected" is a slap in the face and a betrayal of the spirit of what made this show such addictive and on-the-edge-of-your-seat viewing in the first four seasons.

Wow, I didn't realise I had gotten so passionate through words! Anyway I'll sum up: the more I think about this episode, the more I hate the story elements of it, as the show now feels like bad fanfiction rather than the excellent story telling that features consequences for character actions like we saw in the first 4/5 seasons.

Ye Gods that might have been my least favorite episode ever. See Bananaphone's first post for most of my complaints. Especially the Dothraki. The Book Dothraki are bad enough, but the show Dothraki? I'm not sure there are words to express my contempt. It's no wonder they sneer at everybody they can defeat as useless sheep men, because any half competent peasant militia could probably send them packing unless they were heavily outnumbered. The only thing about the stand of the Unsullied against them that should have amazed anyone is that there were Dothraki survivors to cut their braids off and ride away. But it's not just the Dothraki, if you take the Army of the Livings tactics as shown on the show at face value, you have to wonder if any of these people have seen a battle before. Throwing away their cavalry, putting siege engines in front of the lines, keeping most of the archers back on the walls where they can't support the infantry, and so forth. Any half competent medieval commander should know basic combined arms, at least to the extent of using infantry, cavalry and archers in coordination. But most of that is standard fantasy movie/TV bollocks, what is unforgivable is the direction/filming
Nearly 50% of the action in this episode is nearly impossible to figure out without pausing and rewinding, because it's too bloody dark! Given that the Night King's army uses even stupider, more rudimentary tactics than their opponents (at least they have a reason), it does make sense to fight at night. But for God's sake, don't make it so dark and murky that we we're constantly questioning who did what.

The Arya thing didn't bother me. Unless the show explicitly says otherwise, when Arya stealth killed the wight in the library, she took its face and used that to get close to the Night King. Nothing we've seen to this point contradicts that.

Having her steal a wight face and sneak in that way would have been awesome and I was hoping for that when she shanked a wight in the library.

As has been pointed out in other episodes, the wights are WWZ types who will zerg over everything without care if there are a mass of horsemen coming on their flanks. The dorathaki could hack away at the edges but the center will still hammer through everything.Plus the nighttime ment that doing ranged attacks would fail hard.

Sam really should have died and no doubt got others killed(Like Edd) I believe he is a GRRM self-insert so of course he would live but instead we get Jar-Jar Binks